NASA REFUSES TO COMMENT ON ITS FORMER OFFICIAL

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said yesterday that it would have no comment on the announcement that a former highly decorated space official had been linked to Nazi war crimes at a German V-2 rocket factory during World War II.

A spokesman for the agency said there was ''no policy'' on whether the former official, Arthur Rudolph, would be requested to return his NASA decorations. He was awarded the Exceptional Service Medal in 1968 and the Distinguished Service Medal, the agency's highest honor, the following year.

The agency said it had not been notified in advance of an announcement by the Justice Department yesterday that Mr. Rudolph left the United States in March and surrendered his citizenship rather that face charges involving the brutalization of slave laborers at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp and underground rocket factory.

Mr. Rudolph directed the building of the Saturn 5 rocket that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon and managed other space and missile programs.

Former colleagues of Mr. Rudolph said they were stunned by the news.

''It absolutely shocks me; I cannot imagine that he did it,'' said Krafft Ehricke, who worked with Mr. Rudolph at the Peenemu"nde rocket base of Nazi Germany, but not at Nordhausen, and who was brought to the United States with him after the war.

''There was precious little he could do to alleviate the lot of the workers but that he could have contributed to starving, beating the workers is incredible,'' said Dr. Ehricke, now a consultant in La Jolla, Calif. He said he last worked with Mr. Rudolph on missile projects in the 1950's and recalled him as ''a competent, friendly guy, who was good to work with.''

Another who described himself as ''shocked'' was William R. Lucas, director of the George C. Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where Mr. Rudolph managed the Saturn 5 project from 1963 to 1969.

Dr. Lucas said through a spokesman that he had ''absolutely no personal knowledge of Arthur Rudolph's activities during World War II.''

Leaders of Jewish groups welcomed the announcement.

Justin Finger, civil rights director of the Anti-Defamation League, said the action ''stands as a reminder that war criminals, whether past, present or future will not go unpunished.''

Martin Mendelsohn, a lawyer for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and former director of an earlier war crimes unit under the Immigration Service, called it the most ''serious signal'' to date of the Government's intentions to pursue such cases.

Elie Wiesel, the author and a survivor of the Holocaust, said ''justice has been done.''

''We must be sure those killers are not in our midst as free men,'' he said.

He said the news of Mr. Rudolph's contributions to the space effort left him with a feeling of ''painful amazement.''

But he said he was not shocked.

''I am not shocked by anything anymore,'' he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 13 of the National edition with the headline: NASA REFUSES TO COMMENT ON ITS FORMER OFFICIAL. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe